The rhythm and the embers - "Funk: um grito de ousadia e liberdade" at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa

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DATE

23 Feb 2026

AUTHOR

Adolfo Caboclo

The rhythm and the embers - "Funk: um grito de ousadia e liberdade" at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa

AUTHOR

Adolfo Caboclo

“This exhibition, which was on display at MAR - Museu de Arte do Rio, gains a little more diversity in São Paulo: there are additions about funk bruxaria, funk ritmado and tabacada. Funk: um grito de ousadia e Liberdade arrives at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa (Museum of the Portuguese Language) from a plural perspective, with language as its central axis - words, slang and accents - resulting in an aesthetic work focused on linguistics, oral and written memory and the multiple expressions of dialect.”

Estação da Luz and the Baixada Santista

In March 1901, the Estação da Luz (Luz Station) was inaugurated in the city of São Paulo. Built under the influence of the Victorian by the English São Paulo Railway Company, the station is an exact reflection of the Anglophile and Francophile taste that directly influenced Brazilian aesthetics before the Second World War and the global ascendancy of the United States. In the specific case of São Paulo, this aesthetic was financed by the coffee-growing elites.

Some aesthetic developments of this elite can be seen across the street from Estação da Luz: at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, where academic and realist paintings of rural people from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are exhibited. The Pinacoteca also houses the work Antropofagia (1929), by Tarsila do Amaral, an artist who is perhaps the greatest representative of the children of this coffee-growing elite. These "children of the coffee elite" sought a type of modernity, a certain negation of the rural person presented in the previous generation, and in the face of a problematization of this Anglophile scenario, Oswald de Andrade's famous phrase arose: "tupi or not tupi, that is the question".

I provide this context for the Portuguese reader to understand the peculiarities of the environment in which the Museu da Língua Portuguesa germinates, located precisely in Estação da Luz, which was a victim of a terrible fire in 2015 and, fortunately, reopened in 2021. A museum that carries out its curatorial work based on the variations of the Portuguese language.

This is where the exhibition Funk: um grito de ousadia e Liberdade (Funk: a cry of audacity and freedom) takes place until August 30, 2026.

In light of this context, and before delving into the exhibition, it seems pertinent to draw a parallel: while in February 1922, at the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, Brazilian modernists held their famous Modern Art Week, in the same year, ‘the parents, uncles and grandparents of these modernists’ inaugurated the Official Coffee Exchange of Santos, where the Coffee Museum is located today.

I refer to Santos and other historical parallels because Funk: um grito de ousadia e Liberdade talks, in some way, about a type of anthropophagy. An achievement of freedom that establishes a direct relationship with the slave-owning past, sustained, in particular, by this coffee-growing elite. Similarly, the exhibition also reflects the absorption of a black and hip hop culture originating in the United States, which, upon arriving at Estação da Luz, took on a contemporary twist.

Social codes and signs in Luz

With a curatorial approach that leaves no room for noise, the exhibition presents a well-defined scenography, with many texts and videos, and grounded in two core areas: the first is the Victorian station itself, presenting a poetic contrast with the passersby and the architecture – especially in the improvised stage made of beer crates (2023) by Deize Tigrona and in clothing, umbrellas, and photographs that seek the right to narrate their own time.

In this idea of reclaiming the narrative of their own time, funk is presented as a product of maculelê, as an ancestral technology reclaimed by Black youth.

This first part of the exhibition is a good preparation for what will be presented to the visitor after passing through the ticket booths of the Museu da Língua Portuguesa and accessing the second and main core of the exhibition.

The black cube

Curated by Taísa Machado, Dom Filó, Amanda Bonan, Marcelo Campos, and Renata Prado, Funk: um grito de ousadia e Liberdade presents dark walls and an intense rhythm of works and information. The curatorial gesture proposes the exact opposite of minimalism and the white cube, commonly used in museums, galleries and biennials to enhance the objects, constructing a black cube - an immersive space that, in my opinion, works very well.

In this context, the exhibition articulates the history of funk beyond its sound, highlighting its origins in the urban, peripheral cultural matrix, its choreographic dimension, the communities, and its aesthetic, political, and economic developments within the imaginary constructed around it.

The historical context of funk culture is presented in a narrative that begins with a Rio de Janeiro perspective of black culture in the 1960s, 70s and 80s - a period symbolised by the wonderful photograph of James Brown and Wilson Simonal, taken in 1973 by Alfredo Rizzutti - and extends to the 1990s, when funk began to consolidate its own characteristics and assert itself as ‘Brazilian funk’.

It is a genre that dialogues directly with American references, but over time incorporates local elements and acquires its own identity, more Brazilian, more ‘atabacada’. Funk can thus be understood as the result of the transformation of American black music when recreated in Brazil. If the word ‘Brazil’ itself refers to ‘brasa’ (embers), Brazilian funk also presents itself as carrying additional heat: more intense, more rhythmic, more marked by its social and cultural experiences.

This exhibition, which was on display at MAR - Museu de Arte do Rio, gains a little more diversity in São Paulo: there are additions about funk bruxaria, funk ritmado and tabacada. Funk: um grito de ousadia e Liberdade arrives at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa (Museum of the Portuguese Language) from a plural perspective, with language as its central axis - words, slang and accents - resulting in an aesthetic work focused on linguistics, oral and written memory and the multiple expressions of dialect.

BIOGRAPHY

Brazilian artist, curator, critic and poet from São Paulo. He specialises in art, communication, business management and neuroscience. Master in Curatorial Studies and PhD candidate in Contemporary Art at the University of Coimbra. Resident painter at Ateliê Fábrica, curator of various exhibition projects such as ‘Projeto Piccolino’ (Doppo) and ‘Uma exposição no escuro’ (Lufapo Hub). He is a member of the collective Pescada nº5 and founder of Sarau das Flores and Revista Baleia.

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